Data on Housing Relief Questioned

Banks and mortgage firms are providing questionable information about the number of subprime mortgage borrowers they are helping and the rate at which homeowners are falling into foreclosure, according to the top regulator for the nation's largest banks.

(Washington Post.) -- Those details are crucial for regulators to gauge the severity of the housing crisis and evaluate the effectiveness of the steps lenders are taking to address the problems.

John C. Dugan, comptroller of the currency, which oversees national banks, said his agency found "significant limitations with the mortgage performance data reported by other organizations and trade associations."

"Virtually none of the data had been subjected to a rigorous process to check for consistency and completeness -- they were typically responses to surveys that produced aggregate, unverified results from individual firms," Dugan said in a speech in New York on Wednesday. "That lack of loan-level validation raised real questions about the precision of the data, at least for our supervisory purposes."

Dugan said in an interview that he was referring to information provided by groups such as the Mortgage Bankers Association, which reports a foreclosure rate widely cited by regulators and the media. A report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency calculated that the rate was higher based on raw data it collected from nine of the country's largest banks.